I struggle a lot with the big picture. I’m often so mired in day-to-day stuff that it takes significant effort to step back and look at where I’ve come from, where I am and where I’m going.

When it comes to the show, it’s no different. Scott and I spend a lot of time zoomed in on the specifics of what we’re doing — booking guests, recording and editing audio, coming up with content for the website — that we often forget to pause, step back, and take a look at where we’ve arrived. They have cliches that describe this — about forests and trees, and smelly roses. But we’re much too high-brow to invoke such phrases.

Still, I’d like to pause, if you’ll indulge me, and take a look and where we’ve arrived. If I get too self-flagellating, please feel free to take me down a peg in the comments.

You see, the Unknown Studio — the flagship of what we do, the podcast — is coming up on its first birthday. Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is an exceedingly big deal to us. And hopefully to our listeners as well. Here’s a bit of a year in review for you:

• At some tweet-up in April or May 2009: Scott and I met, became reacquainted, and mused over the idea of creating a hyperlocal podcast.
• At some point at the beginning of June 2009: Scott and I met, this time to discuss, exclusively, the podcast. We started to plan things. We even enlisted the help of Daryl Hooke to come up with a show name, something I’m not sure we ever fully gave him credit for (thanks so much for naming us, Daryl!)
• June 23, 2009: We published our first show, with guest Brittney Le Blanc.
• July 6, 2009: We randomly introduced the Fast Fifteen into the [second ever!] show.
• November 2009: With the help of the wonderful, brilliant and beautiful Sally Poulsen, we launched the knew website… you’re lookin’ at it. And thanks to a young man named Eldon, we also got an official-looking logo!
• December 2009: We got our first sponsor! The Edmonton Journal!
  Also, a guy named Baxx asked if he can rebroadcast episodes of the show on his pirate radio station. We obliged. Baxx eventually got shut down by Industry Canada.
• January 2010: Scott and I spoke at the CUP National Conference… We were excited to be recognized as at least competent in our craft.
• February 2010: Along with TheEdmontonian.com, TrueBritl.com and UserCreatedContent.ca, we founded the League of Extraordinary Media (LXM).
• March 20, 2010: Along with fellow LXM members, we hosted our first ever event: YEGSwap.
• April 2010: We scored our second sponsor, Guru Digital Arts College — the start of a beautiful friendship, and the very beginnings of the construction of our own studio.
• June 8, 2010: We hosted a very successful ALEx II along with Daveberta.ca and the LXM.

So what does the future hold for the Unknown Studio? Well, we celebrate our birthday at the end of the month and we have exciting plans for Episode 27 at the end of June — which will feature a return appearance from Brittney Le Blanc, who’s rather sore at us that she’s the only Unknown Studio guest who’s never done a Fast Fifteen (that still doesn’t sound right).

You’re going to want to tune into that episode, as we’ll have some very awesome content and some exciting news to share with you.

Also, later on this summer, we’ll be having a proper birthday party — with cake and all! — alongside our lovely colleagues at TheEdmontonian.com, who are coming up on their first birthday as well.

To friends, listeners and naysayers alike, thank you so much for your support/constructive criticism over the last year. It’s shocking we’ve been able to do so much… and that we plan to do so much more. 😉

Oh! If you want to get more “meta updates” from the Unknown Studio, make sure to subscribe to our newsletter! I personally promise that unless something incredibly rad is going down, we’ll only send your one newsletter per month. Deal? Deal.

birthday, Edmonton, growing, podcast, self-flagellation, unknown studio